Wednesday 9 July 2008

End of the line for DDC?

LibraryThing - a kind of online book club with social software features à la Flickr - recently issued a call for people to "help build the Open Shelves Classification (OSC), a free, 'humble', modern, open-source, crowd-sourced replacement for the Dewey Decimal System." Tim ?, LibraryThing's founder explains why he thinks it necessary:

"The Dewey Decimal System® was great for its time, but it's outlived that. Libraries today should not be constrained by the mental models of the 1870s, doomed to tinker with an increasingly irrelevant system. Nor should they be forced into a proprietary system—copyrighted, trademarked and licensed by a single entity—expensive to adopt and encumbered by restrictions on publishing detailed schedules or coordinating necessary changes."

More details and some early comments on the idea can bee seen at LibraryThing's web site.

2 comments:

John Lindsay said...

This is as good a place as anywhere to start

Just use Dewey - JuD

Stephen said...

I think we have all struggeld with own book collections from time to time - the may fill a need.

It may be harder than they think - most readers here know that organising knowledge is more political that you would expect.